AG Nominee Loretta Lynch Makes Cordial Rounds With Senators

President Barack Obama's nominee to replace Eric Holder as attorney general has been out and about among members of Congress, making nice and setting the table for what are expected to be deep confirmation hearings in January, BuzzFeed reports.

Loretta Lynch has quietly spent the past few weeks meeting with about 30 senators, including members of the Judiciary Committee, to pave the way for her as the administration makes its own aggressive pitch that she has the right background for a tough job, BuzzFeed said.

Lynch is expected to face an exhaustive grilling. Sources told BuzzFeed that Lynch will tout her experience working on cases of national scope at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. Among those have been cases involving the al-Qaida terrorist network as well as public corruption cases.

Noted BuzzFeed of her prospects: "Senate Democrats remain confident she will get confirmed in a bipartisan fashion and that her confirmation hearings will be fair, but there is little doubt on their end that Lynch will face tough questioning about how the president’s executive order on immigration falls within his enforcement authority under the Constitution."

Incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa says he'll allow plenty of time for a broad array of questions to be asked of Lynch, BuzzFeed said.

"U.S. attorneys are rarely elevated directly to this position, so I look forward to learning more about her, how she will interact with Congress, and how she proposes to lead the department," Grassley said.

Lynch, 55, is a Greensboro, N.C., native who graduated from Harvard Law School. She is the daughter and granddaughter of ministers and has served as a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank, CNN reported of her background. If confirmed, she would become the nation's first black female attorney general.

Lynch, in addition to her recent nomination, is leading the Justice Department's investigation into the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Bloomberg reported.

After a grand jury declined to indict the police officer involved, who used an unapproved method to subdue him, mass protests broke out over what many see as social injustice and a racial imbalance in the legal system.

Garner, 43, was selling untaxed cigarettes when police stopped him and attempted to make an arrest, an act that was caught on video as he screamed, "I can't breathe." The phrase has become a rallying cry used by protesters around the country.

President Barack Obama's nominee to replace Eric Holder as attorney general has been out and about among members of Congress, making nice and setting the table for what are expected to be deep confirmation hearings in January, BuzzFeed reports.